Case study: Postmates meets giving. A one-week design sprint to help local people in need.

The Challenge

How might we make homeless activism more accessible?

Mindmapping

I first started mapping out my current, general understanding of the problems and solutions already involved.

Tackling homeless issues in a week’s time is insane, but a task I was willing to dive into and explore. I do tip my hat to the Samaritan app for having the most robust solution in the digital market.

Research Goals

1. To understand roadblocks and motivations around donating and giving practices from a simple gesture to vetted charity resources.
2. To validate and invalidate assumptions around a direct delivery giving service.
3. To shape a solution that best fits the individual needs of both giving and receiving community members.

Research Tools And Resources Used

My Assumptions And Questions I Had Around Them

I felt the need to expose my thoughts and feelings around this problem.

From current market solutions to what could be accomplished, I began to list out what I believed and the questions that could be asked to help expose more truth to the current context.

User Interviews

Who I spoke to:

• 12 participants
• 5 have experienced homelessness or have a family member who has experienced housing insecurity
• 9 people have volunteered or have given to a charity at some point

Data Synthesis With Affinity Mapping

I proceeded to synthesize my user interview data, exposing some interesting insights that inspired the next steps in design.

Here are some quotes worth mentioning:

“ I dont give money, I give food. Something to use.”

“Immediate response donations [to a specific cause] made it feel more impactful.”

“I want to see my money in action.”

Some key findings in market research

Market Research

reference link

Research here was strenuous but insightful:

• Explored 23 app store products
• Sourced from 40 articles around expert solutions for homelessness and current apps in the market

The Problem

Through user interviews:

• 83% of people expressed a lack of trust for existing donation solutions due to a lack of transparency and corruption.
• Most participants default to giving items and cash on the street rather than a vetted service because they don’t see many options that feel directly impactful to what they donate to.
• Frustration and confusion ensue from too many options that give minimal tangible impact leave people feeling lost.

Ideation And Sketching

This phase was pretty much a bunch of ideation and figuring out more ways to impact people directly. From mobilizing people around laws that affect homelessness to a systematic “homeless helper” chatbot that directed you to local resources.

Paper Prototyping

Marvel prototype here

Team Critique Sessions

2 rounds of designer feedback and critique sessions.

5 people participated in each round.

Key findings include:

• New strategies around logistics and flow of service
• Emphasis on features that show a clear, direct impact

“Be specific about where people are in the process.”

Listed User Flows

What I did:

Did a listed storyboard of the flow of both giving and receiving ends of the experience

How it helped:

To better map out the step-by-step process in a lightweight way that helped uncover roadblocks in logistics

Balsamiq Prototyping

Usability Insights with Low-Fidelity Balsamiq Prototype

Prototype link

Tested with:

• 5 participants

The goal for the prototype:

• Uncover usability issues
• Uncover more logistics and service concerns

What I learned:

• Notification approaches that can greatly increase engagement
• Some button copy and page flow was too confusing for people to navigate
• 4 out of 5 participants expressed that they don’t feel friction around the concept and are open to signing up

Challenges

• Logistics was huge for me in this, going from a direct delivery model like UberEats to something more close to an Amazon locker approach that expects the end-user to pick up from a store or public location
• I spent more time on market research than I should have, simply battling with curiosity and time constraints

Suggestions for Next Steps

• Test booths in public locations in Los Angeles such as grocery stores and libraries to be temporary pop-up pickup stations
• Team up with community resources. Learn and iterate from best practices
• Design high-fidelity designs and flows to further test product-market-fit
• Smoke test a landing page around user conversion rates before we have a robust development solution